‘No, it’s not a portrait of me,’ said Mr. Blandfoot, his voice dwelling on the preposition. ‘It would be a pity to waste a good canvas on me, wouldn’t it?’ So yellow did his face look in the high shadowy place where he sat that for a moment nobody spoke. Mrs. Stornway’s fluttering ‘How can you say such a ridiculous thing?’ came too late. Mr. Blandfoot seemed to have observed the pause, for there was a noticeable grimness in his voice as he added:
‘In fact it’s not a portrait at all—of any living person.’
‘Oh, then he’s dead,’ concluded Mrs. Pepperthwaite quickly.
‘There’s more than one,’ Mr. Blandfoot rejoined. Some would say they’re dead; some would say they never lived at all; some would say they’re still living. I’m a plain man: I can’t pretend to judge.’
‘You say you’re plain,’ said Mrs. Peets, a little impatiently. ‘But you speak in riddles. I expect it’s a mythological subject.’
‘You’re not far wrong,’ said Mr. Blandfoot. ‘Just a little blasphemous, that’s all.’
‘I don’t care for them much myself,’ observed Mrs. Peets. ‘And how can it be a mythological subject, if it was painted specially for you? I thought they never did that sort of thing now.’
‘By request,’ said Mr. Blandfoot, who seemed to enjoy the conversation, ‘they’ll do almost anything.’
‘Well, we’ve learned a certain amount,’ said Mrs. Peets briskly, ‘though I must say it’s been like drawing blood out of a stone. It’s a semi-mythological picture, painted in Java at Mr. Blandfoot’s request. Who, may I ask, was the artist?’
‘I’m afraid his name wouldn’t mean anything to you, though in his time he was supreme,’ said Mr. Blandfoot.
‘Well, really, Mr. Blandfoot,’ protested Mrs. Pepperthwaite bridling, ‘you seem to think we don’t know anything about Art. Settlemarsh isn’t a big place, but we have a picture-gallery, as you should know by this time.’
‘Yes, now that you’ve insulted us,’ said Mrs. Peets, ‘I think you ought to let us see the picture. We simply cannot wait another minute.’
‘Well, there it is,’ said Mr. Blandfoot. ‘Look at it. Excuse me coming down, my foot’s gone to sleep.’ He began to wave it in the air.
Together they walked slowly towards the picture. Mrs. Peets took it and reverently but firmly turned it round towards the light. First came an impression of blue, stabbed by an arrow of white. Then the subject revealed itself to all their eyes.
‘Why, it’s the Matterhorn!’ Mrs. Peets exclaimed.
‘No, Mt. Cervin,’ said Mrs. Pepperthwaite, examining it more closely.
‘They’re both the same,’ said Mrs. Stornway, who had travelled.
‘Then it’s not the picture!’ they cried in chorus, the inflexion of their voices making a very chord of disappointment.
‘No,’ said Mr. Blandfoot, ‘it’s not the picture. Why, did you think it was?’
‘Now I call that too bad of you,’ said Mrs. Peets.
‘Isn’t he a tease?’ demanded Mrs. Pepperthwaite with ineffective playfulness.
‘I don’t believe they ever try to climb the Matterhorn from this side,’ announced Mrs. Stornway. ‘But the picture will go very nicely here.’ As though fortified by the knowledge of Mrs. Marling’s friendship she was the first to recover herself. There was a silence while she fitted the very blue print into a space between two photographic jungle-studies. When she had finished she looked round the crowded walls and said in a voice that sounded hurt but well-bred:
‘But now there’s no room for the real picture—the one Mr. Blandfoot wouldn’t show us.’
‘Oh,’ said he, still from the top of the steps, ‘that’s hung already.’
‘But we’ve been everywhere,’ protested Mrs. Pepperthwaite, who couldn’t forgo the appearance of curiosity as easily as could Mrs. Stornway.
‘No,’ said Mr. Blandfoot, his voice conveying reproach, ‘not quite everywhere.’
Both of the other women suffered while Mrs. Pepperthwaite racked her memory for places they had not seen. Her mental processes were becoming clear even to herself when Mrs. Peets cut in:
‘Not in the coal cellar, for instance.’
‘No,’ said Mr. Blandfoot. ‘The picture has never been there.’
‘So it walks about, does it?’ said Mrs. Peets. ‘How curious.’ She was still ruffled, as they all were, by the practical joke that they felt had been played on them.
‘I usually take it with me,’ Mr. Blandfoot admitted.
‘Then it must be a miniature,’ declared Mrs. Pepperthwaite triumphantly. Her less sophisticated nature quickly threw off its mood of sulkiness, but her companions still stood on their dignity.
‘No,’ said Mr. Blandfoot, who always seemed pleased to disagree. ‘It’s a fair size—the ordinary size.’
‘What is the ordinary size?’ demanded Mrs. Peets.
‘Oh,’ Mr. Blandfoot replied, making a wide gesture on his airy perch, ‘the size that fits the circumstances.’
‘What are the circumstances?’ Mrs. Peets persisted.
‘Well, the flesh, for example, is the circumstances of the soul.’
The three women received this dictum in silence. Doubt and disappointment appeared in their faces. What a tame dull ending to an enterprise that had seemed so full of promise. Mrs. Pepperthwaite began looking behind the sofa for her bag; Mrs. Stornway picked up hers and started to put on her gloves. Only Mrs. Peets held her ground. She looked up thoughtfully at Mr. Blandfoot, who had the appearance of an umpire at a tennis match.
‘I don’t suppose you want to sell your picture?’ she inquired. Her voice suggested that, little though it would fetch, the thought of selling it might easily have occurred to such a man as Mr. Blandfoot.
‘Oh no,’ said he, ‘we are inseparable.’
‘But if its value goes up, wouldn’t you consider parting with it then?’
‘I hope,’ he answered rather gravely, ‘I shan’t have to part with it for many years,’ He came down the steps, but so tall was he that Mrs. Pepperthwaite, whose grasp of facts was feeble and at the mercy of her imagination, could scarcely believe he was not still aloft. With various shades of ungraciousness they accepted his thanks for their kind offices, but something in his manner made them unwilling to show their disappointment openly. As they stood on the doorstep Mrs. Peets made a last appeal:
‘So you won’t show us the picture after all?’
For a moment he looked as though he might really oblige them, and all their curiosity flooded back.
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he said suddenly. I’ll show it to Mrs. Marling.’
He smiled down into their bewildered faces; and as he shut the door, they could still see, though his face was turned away, the smile lingering on his large, spare, yellowish cheek.
‘I know the word to describe that man,’ exclaimed Mrs. Stornway, who had just learned it and used it more often than the occasion warranted. ‘He’s sinister!’
Directly she reached home she telephoned to Mrs. Marling. Mrs. Marling, it was well known, resented the telephone as an intrusion upon private life: she was as inaccessible to it as to all other demands on her attention. But finally she came.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Eva, Alice, Eva.’
‘Eva Alice Eva: I don’t know the name. Alice is my name: would you kindly spell yours?’
Mrs. Stornway spelt it.
‘My darling Eva, how good of you to telephone, though of course you know I hardly ever use it, it makes me feel so deaf. Can’t bear to feel deaf at my age. Had you anything to say, dearest?’
‘Oh, Alice, I’ve got such heaps to tell you. May I come round tomorrow?’
‘I’m afraid I’m engaged to-morrow.’
‘Wednesday then?’
‘Wednesday is no good.’
‘What about Thursday?’
‘Dearest Eva, you mustn’t let me take up your whole week! Couldn’t you tell me now?’
; ‘It’s about Mr. Blandfoot’s picture.’
‘His brick shirt?’
‘No, his picture.’
‘Oh,’ in disappointed tones. ‘Have you seen it?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. Then what have you got to say about it?
‘He wants you to see it, he wants to show it to you.’
‘To me? Oh no. That wouldn’t do. Oh no. Not at my age. I’m too old to look at pictures: I make them myself now.’
‘Well, that’s what he said.’
‘Darling, how frivolous you are. Come and see me on Friday. Yes, Mr. Hesketh will still be here. There’s no sign of his going away.’
It was two days later. Dinner was over, and Mrs. Marling and Mr. Hesketh were sitting over their port: over his port, that is. It had ceased to circulate. As Mr. Hesketh raised his glass, his rich booming voice caused tiny tremors to appear on the surface of the wine.
‘You ought to drink more port,’ said Mrs. Marling. ‘It’s well known to be good for the throat.’ Her pose was upright and her slender body never moved; but there was a hint of weariness in the lines round her eyes.
‘Very kind of you, my dear Alice, I’m sure,’ replied Mr. Hesketh, refilling his glass and staring into it. ‘I shall take your advice to heart. How long has this very excellent port wine lain in your cellar?’
‘You must ask Dodge,’ said Mrs. Marling. ‘He has the key. But I believe my husband put some down the same year that The Logic of the Grape came out—twenty-five years ago?’
‘Thirty.’
‘To look at you,’ said Mrs. Marling, with one of her rare smiles, ‘who would have thought it? Of the two vintages, if I may say so, I prefer your novel.’ She sipped her wine.
‘It has often occurred to me to wonder, Alice,’ remarked Mr. Hesketh, pleased by the compliment—as everyone was pleased when Mrs. Marling said something nice to them, so clearly did she go out of her way to do it—‘why, when Richard died, you stayed on here, a triton among minnows?’ He put his hands on the table-edge and looked hard at her, as though he really wanted an answer.
‘But does that matter when whales like yourself, great, gambolling, famous, good-natured whales, come to stay with me?’
‘Unfortunately, I can’t be here all the time,’ said Mr. Hesketh a trifle heavily.
‘But you’re here a good time—at least I mean when you’re here I have a good time,’ said Mrs. Marling.
‘You are quite right,’ the novelist agreed. Like many people slightly under the influence of alcohol, he was appealing to the Past to give up a decaying friendship, and he thought the best way of recovering it was by a series of intimate references to their common memories. ‘With your talents, if you had lived in London, you might have done almost anything—you might have gone far, very far.’
‘I’m afraid so,’ replied Mrs. Marling. ‘But don’t you think it’s better that I should be somebody in Settlemarsh than almost nobody in London?’
‘Oh, my dear Alice,’ Mr. Hesketh exclaimed, ‘don’t mistake my meaning. I was talking to Dick Gresham the other day, and Richard Gresham is not a man to use words lightly, and he said, “Of all the women I ever knew” (and he’s known a great many) “the most brilliant by far was Alice Ingilby” (that’s you, of course). “Most provincial towns are deadly,” he said, “and Settlemarsh not least; but when you had met her, say just coming away from church, the very bricks and slates sparkled, and the streets were alive with joy!” Once, he said, when he had met you he counted all the palings between his house and Chittlegate, it was so impossible, after one had talked to you, not to find the world interesting! And now I come and I see you surrounded by wretched second-rate people swarming in jerry-built bungalows, with no feeling for the art of life, only an idle curiosity in what the day brings forth and a pitiful competitive snobbishness that has its goal, as it always had, in you.’
Mrs. Marling was silent for a moment after this tribute. To what emotion the slight movement of the muscles about her mouth testified, who could say? Then her eyes hardened, she leaned back as though taking control of the conversation and said:
‘At least I haven’t troubled you with these second-rate people. I kept them from you. It is true they can only take in one word at a time, and your longer speeches might be above their heads. I have always tried to do my best for everybody, Arthur! Even when that means not seeing them for months together! I have my duty to these unhappy creatures, you forget that. You’re so mobile, you’re such a gadabout and welcome in so many houses, you don’t remember what it is to stay at home and hear about the gardener’s baby. You have a large public which looks after you—I a small district which I look after—don’t I seem,’ she went on, her mood lightening, ‘to have the cares of the community on my shoulders? And if you think I should like to live always among brilliant people like yourself you mistake me utterly, Arthur! You are a treat to me, a sugar-plum, a prize for a good, clever girl. But I’m not often good and hardly ever clever, and I couldn’t have you here very much, I shouldn’t dare. Oh no! Oh no!’ she went on, wagging her finger at him. ‘You and your standards would kill me. I must have my stupid friends, that you haven’t been allowed to see, to come in and say one word at a time—one word at a time. “Does—Mrs.—Peets—dye—her hair?” That’s the sort of thing I really enjoy. But now, tell me, where have you seen my second-rate friends, swarming in their bungalows? You can’t have seen them. They live in fashionable Little Settlemarsh, far from this slum. You can’t have heard their wireless sets, much less them.’
Mrs. Marling had put her question like an inquisitor, and the novelist, the wheels of whose conversational machinery had run down while she talked, did not answer immediately. Moreover, it was never easy to tell Mrs. Marling of an acquaintance of whom she might not approve.
‘I ran into Catcomb yesterday,’ he said as casually as he could.
‘What, that man? I thought he was dead years ago!’
‘No,’ said Mr. Hesketh, his confidence returning now that the worst was over. ‘He’s very much alive and bubbling over with excitement.’
‘He always was,’ Mrs. Marling murmured with distaste.
‘Excitement because a man has come to live in Settlemarsh who owns a picture of fabulous value. It’s so valuable, it seems, that he won’t let it out of his sight.’
‘Or into anyone else’s,’ Mrs. Marling put in.
‘I’m coming to that. In places like this people exaggerate. What they mean is he keeps it under lock and key. From the description, size, subject, etc., and the fact that it was found in Java, always a Dutch colony, I should judge it to be a Vermeer. In fact I’m practically sure it’s a Vermeer: so few of them are known, there must be more somewhere.’
‘Do you mean to say that this Mr. Blandfoot conceals about his person a picture by Vermeer?’
‘No, no, but if he is a prudent man, and the picture is as yet unauthenticated, no doubt he keeps it in a safe place. But the point I was coming to is this.’
‘Well?’
‘You know how reluctant he has been—naturally, considering its value—to let anyone see the picture?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Mrs. Marling. ‘As you were saying, I live in Settlemarsh and unfortunately I can’t be blind or deaf to all that goes on there.’
‘Well,’ said the novelist, ‘Catcomb tells me that Blandfoot wants to show the picture to you.’
Mrs. Marling said nothing. Thoughts crowded into her mind: her youth when she had had Settlemarsh at her feet, the parties she had given, the people from the great world who had graced them, the larger ambitions she had entertained but which she had abandoned from cautiousness, from laziness, from conscience, for a dozen reasons. She thought of her empire which, like the Roman Empire under Hadrian, was now technically at its greatest extent. She had maintained it for many years against every kind of opposition and difficulty: assault, intrigue, her own diminished resources. The advent of Mr. Blandfoot troubled her, and taxed her pow
ers as they had not been taxed for a long time. To the world of Settlemarsh it seemed that she was merely reserving her fire. But she knew too well that in her inactivity there lurked a grain of fatigue. She was not really weighing the reasons for and against Mr. Blandfoot’s admission into her charmed circle; she was shirking her responsibilities as the mentor of Settlemarsh, she was letting things slide. And it troubled her the more to feel this lethargy, because she was aware that Mr. Blandfoot was already a centre of disaffection and revolt, and that he must be definitely assimilated into her system, or rejected from it. And her own indifference to whether he was admitted or not alarmed her: it was like the sound of the footsteps of old age gaining upon her. She must pull herself together and take the field. After all, what better occasion than the present, with a renowned novelist at her side to support her, supposing she needed support? She turned to Mr. Hesketh, who was meditatively eyeing the decanter.
‘Dear Arthur, it must be very dull for you alone with such a fossil as me.’
‘Alice, how can you say such a thing?’ he protested.
‘Oh no, oh no,’ she said, ‘in spite of your beautiful manners, I can see your eye wandering whenever I begin these long sentimental anecdotes about my early years. I see I am becoming a bore. Don’t say “no” again. I can’t bear to be contradicted. But I tell you what I’m going to do: I’m going to give a party for all those second-rate people you despise so much! For one evening at least their bungalows will know them no more. Then you will realize that I, like you, am a public benefactor. To make it amusing for them I shall say that you are here. And to make it amusing for you—do you know what I shall do?’
‘Alice, you derange yourself too much!’ murmured the novelist.
‘I shall invite Mr. Blandfoot to come and show us his picture!’
‘Ah!’cried Mr. Hesketh.
‘And now,’ said Mrs. Marling, rising briskly, ‘I shall go and join the ladies. You must stay here and drink some port. You simply haven’t had any! What would my husband say, if he saw that poor little decanter still groaning with wine!’